Safety-critical systems may be found in a wide range of technical domains such as aerospace, transport systems, healthcare systems, automotive systems and industrial automation systems. With the growing system complexity of such safety-critical systems, also the need for safety assessment of the safety-critical system is increasing in order to meet the high quality demands in these technical domains. The goal of a safety assessment process is to identify all failures that cause hazardous situations and to demonstrate that the probability of occurrence of such failures is sufficiently low. In the application domains of safety-critical systems, the corresponding safety assurance process may be defined by means of safety standards. The analysis of a safety-critical system may be performed by using bottom-up safety analysis approaches such as failure mode and effect analysis FMEA, or by using top-down safety analysis approaches such as fault tree analysis FTA. By performing a safety analysis it is possible to identify failure modes, their causes and effects having an impact on the system safety. Component fault trees CFTs provide a model- and component-based methodology for fault tree analysis FTA which supports a modular and compositional safety analysis of the respective safety-critical system. Component fault tree elements are related to their development artefacts and may be reused along with the respective development artefact. However, the generation of a component fault tree of a complex safety-critical system may be cumbersome and prone to errors since it is mostly done manually by a safety engineer.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a method and apparatus for generating automatically a component fault tree of an investigated safety-critical system.